A Quiet Townhouse, A Great Gift

Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from an old friend—Andrew Egan. This is his first piece since 2023, and we’re happy to have him back on here once again. I’ll be back at the bottom of the piece with some interesting links. Anyway, over to Andrew:

A favorite pastime of tourists visiting New York City is learning the names and locations of various, usually famous, neighborhoods. They often get them wrong, but when in Rome it helps to speak some Latin. Some neighborhoods are pretty well-defined, like TriBeca and SoHo. Many others are not.

Take the area just north of the United Nations Headquarters, as an example. This area, north of 43rd Street and south of 53rd, and bordered by the East River and Lexington Avenue to the west, is understandably home to many diplomats and support staff for the United Nations. Permanent missions and consuls dot the area. Most commonly known as Turtle Bay, the name does change with slight boundary variations. And, of course, areas change over time.

This part of Manhattan saw its first European settlement in the 1600s as a Dutch farm. During the American Revolution, British General William Howe established his headquarters in the area. It was here that Nathan Hale, spy and hero of the Independence movement, said his famous,
possibly apocryphal, last words, “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Last words are not the only aspect of Hale’s life in dispute, as the exact location of his death is not known either, but it is immortalized on First Avenue between 49th and 50th.

After the war and into the 19th and 20th centuries, Turtle Bay would develop heavy industries, such as power generation and animal processing, alongside tenements and brownstones. Before the neighborhood became the capital of international diplomacy, it was home to elite entertainers, specifically Broadway composers.

Where the neighborhood’s past and present collide is at the end of East 50th Street, currently home of the Consul and Permanent Mission to the United Nations of Luxembourg. But from 1947 to 1989, it was the home of famed songwriter Irving Berlin. This is where he wrote such staples of the American songbook as “White Christmas”, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)”.

Noted Broadway luminaries such as Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim lived in the area during their most productive periods. Porter had rather lux accommodations living in the Waldorf Towers on East 50th Street for nearly 30 years until he died in 1964. Sondheim purchased a rowhouse at 246 East 49th Street with the proceeds of his first hit musical, later referring to it as “the house that Gypsy built”.

Why this area became home to so many Broadway composers makes sense in hindsight. The neighborhood was relatively suburban compared with downtown Manhattan. Commercial real estate in Midtown did not gain momentum in earnest until after World War II, with significant growth occurring in the 1950s and 1960s. However, iconic buildings like the Chrysler and Empire State buildings were already erected in the 1930s. Commutes were also short as Turtle Bay is within walking distance to Times Square, home to many of Broadways most prominent venues.

The proximity to peers and colleagues also allowed members of the Broadway community to socialize and host members of New York’s broader arts community. It was in this context that a largely forgotten, but successful at the time, composer would make their most lasting contribution to American art.

The mostly forgotten performer who gifted an iconic author the gift of time

Michael Brown was born in Marfa, Texas in 1920. After attending the University of Texas at Austin and receiving a master’s in English literature from the University of Virginia, Brown enlisted in the Army in 1944. When not fulfilling his military duties, he wrote and performed songs. He moved to New York in 1946 after his discharge, where he became known as a cabaret performer, composer, and lyricist.

The post-war era of American live theater was experimenting with form and medium. Some of Brown’s earliest Broadway work appeared on stage and was filmed for nationwide theatrical release. This period overlapped with America’s post-war economic boom (for nearly a decade following the war, the US accounted for approximately 50 percent of global GDP) while NYC cemented its status as a financial and corporate hub. With outsized profits, these bankers and corporations decided to spend quite a bit of money on the local Broadway scene.

In Brown’s 2014 New York Times obituary, they note, “At midcentury, many American corporations put on Broadway-style musical extravaganzas for their employees. Typically staged for just a performance or two at sales conferences and managerial meetings and occasionally recorded for posterity, the shows were meant to rally the troops…”

These weren’t the employee-organized skits at modern corporate retreats. Not only did these productions feature professional casts, like Florence Henderson later of “The Brady Bunch” fame, but also much larger budgets than traditional Broadway musicals. A typical production might cost $500,000 at this time, but “industrial musicals”, as they would become known, might have budgets as high as $3 million.

The Times obituary would note Brown’s sincere effort when crafting his industrial musicals. A particularly delightful passage from “Love Song to an Electrolux” goes:

This is the perfect matchment

All sweet and serene.

I’ve formed an attachment

I’m in love with a lovely machine.

Michael Brown’s magnum opus would come with “Wonderful World of Chemistry”, a musical written for the Du Pont pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. The 24-minute musical was performed some 40 times a day and was seen by an estimated five million people for nearly 17,000 performances. The longest-running traditional Broadway musical, “The Phantom of the Opera”, closed in 2023 with a little more than 13,000 performances.

By the mid-1950s, Brown and his wife, Joy, had become established members of the NYC Broadway set. They hosted and attended gatherings across Turtle Bay and Manhattan. Their townhouse is just down 50th Street, within eyesight of Irving Berlin’s famed residence. It would not be Brown’s considerable musical talent that would be his lasting contribution to American arts. Oddly enough, it would be his and wife Joy’s graciousness that would be remembered.

In 1954, Brown contributed lyrics to a Broadway musical called “House of Flowers” with music by Harold Arlen and a book by a young writer named Truman Capote.

Capote would become famous globally and infamous in Manhattan for his socializing and gossip. But in the mid-1950s, he had yet to find his big break and still spent a fair amount of time with a childhood friend from his native Alabama.

She moved to New York in 1956 to become a writer. The reality was she had bills to pay, so she got a job as an airline reservations clerk. She hung out with Truman and his growing circle of artist friends when she could, occasionally working on a novel when she had time. Sometime in 1956, she met Michael and Joy Brown.

The couple took a liking to the aspiring writer, inviting her over for dinner regularly, leading to a Christmas invitation in 1956. The Browns had had a decent year financially. In the fall, Michael had produced a musical fashion show for Esquire magazine. With the profits, the Browns decided to give her a gift.

In a 1961 essay, she remembers seeing an envelope with her name on it in the branches of the Brown’s Christmas tree, “I opened it and read; ‘You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.’”

The rough draft for what would eventually be titled “To Kill a Mockingbird”, was finished by the spring of 1957 but would undergo significant rewrites until its publication in 1960. Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and would not publish another book until shortly before she died in 2016.

The exact details of the Brown’s supporting role in Harper Lee’s career were largely kept secret for nearly 50 years. A 2006 biography revealed that Lee insisted the gift be a loan, which Michael Brown said had been repaid long ago.

Lee admits to thinking it was a “fantastic gamble” but that Michael Brown reassured her by saying, “No honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.”

Ms. Brown recalled to the Times the couple’s astonishment when they heard Lee’s publisher was ordering 5,000 copies for the novel’s first run. She remembers thinking, “Who in the world is going to buy 5,000 copies?”

HarperCollins, the book’s current publisher, says “To Kill a Mockingbird” has sold 30 million copies in 40 languages worldwide.

If this is where you expect a picture of the plaque commemorating Michael Brown or Harper Lee at the house on East 50th Street, well, there isn’t one. In a neighborhood that celebrates vague historical locations and recent pop culture, it is sort of odd that the Brown’s contributions to the arts aren’t more publicly celebrated.

New York is riddled with such stories. Some have inspired developers to create arbitrary neighborhood names to boost marketing appeal and raise rents.

In 2017, developers attempted to rebrand the area between 110th and 125th Streets, which is Harlem, as SoHa, or South Harlem. Residents were understandably furious and roundly rejected the move.

“How dare someone try to rob our culture, and try to act as if we were not here, and create a new name, a new reality as if the clock started when other people showed up?” one state legislator representing the area said at the time.

Bypassing the rather large and contentious topic of gentrification, the move to rename one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world was just stupid. Especially considering how ill-defined many NYC neighborhoods are in reality. Maybe the easiest way to define any area is by what happened there.

Beyond Michael Brown’s success and Harper Lee’s nascent talent, another element was vital in bringing them together: Turtle Bay. It was here that artists built their lives atop the history of Dutch farmers, British generals, and butchers. While his musical achievements have become a footnote from the golden era of Broadway, Michael and Joy Brown’s dedication to art followed that success. Without Du Pont or Electrolux or Esquire, and the eternal corporate desire to motivate employees with anything other than increased pay, the Brown’s would not have been able to be modest patrons. Without that support, perhaps “To Kill a Mockingbird” would be published a few years later, or not at all.

Artists created a neighborhood while delighting audiences from around the world just a few blocks away. They invited up-and-coming talent into their homes for dinner, drinks, and good conversation. And every once in a while, they funded new work that would change the world.